I was going to take the holidays off…

But then this Tuesday, I had this insight that I just couldn’t let another year go by where women everywhere would make the same body resolutions not because they truly want to but because they think they have to.

I put together this podcast from the heart for you all. It was recorded in my bedroom in the most makeshift setup because the message just couldn’t wait until I had access to my office again in January.

In this podcast, you’ll learn the main lessons I’ve learned from years of being amazing at planning but really mean to myself and how to throw it all away and create heartfelt resolutions from SELF guidance.

I use my last pre feminine embodiment body goal to show exactly where I shortchanged myself and share how I am sincerely honouring myself/values/desires, I am doing this for me out of respect for myself and I am setting myself up for success.

If there’s one takeaway this week, it’s this:

Goal setting, resolutions, all of it, can be a beautiful and enriching experience when done from self guidance.

You can listen to the full episode HERE

Hello everyone and welcome to the 7th episode of season 1 of SELF guided. 

Heartfelt Resolutions for the Self Guided

Are you someone who likes to make New Year’s resolutions? Are you someone who stands firm against them? In either case, I want you to listen to this episode before you make a decision either way. Being self-guided when dreaming up your next goal, because it’s the same process, will get you much better results than if you are not self guided.

It all boils down to how you treat yourself when you’re making putting together your resolution or goal. By the end of this podcast or when you have your new goal set up, what I really want for you is to be able to say YES to the following questions: am I honouring myself/values/desires, am I doing this for me out of respect for myself and am I setting myself up for success?

I recognized that I’ve talked about goal setting on the podcast before. Actually, in some way or other, it may be the topic I’ve talked about the most. It is seriously one of those areas in my life where I’ve always excelled at but I was always so hard on myself so it also became an area where I developed so much wisdom. It was all the trial and error and finding what works for me not what others tell me should work for me. This is my usual disclaimer asking you to be discerning.what I share is what works for me, you get to experiment, you get to toss out what doesn’t resonate.

Now this podcast is called self guided so before we move on with the episode, consider taking a pause to decide what your intention is in listening on. You know mine, I shared it already, I want you to be able to…what about you? What are you wanting to get from this podcast episode?

Today, I want to take a topic that most women I know base many of their goals around the body. The body is so important in being self guided, being able to listen to its messages and express your being-ness in the world. Unfortunately, we hear so many messages about how our bodies should be that we disconnect with our own in favour of having it look or perform a certain way. 

I don’t know about you but I certainly grew up hearing family members talking about how this year would be the year they’d finally lose the baby weight (never mind that the baby was now in their 20s) or sometimes it was about habits that would change like no more sugar and flour, etc.

That’s not even taking into account what I would read as magazine covers about new year resolutions, they echoed what I heard in my family. Here’s what’s interesting, those goals in themselves are not bad if they come from your values and that you are happy with them, unfortunately, most of the goals I mentioned were driven by wanting to fit in or be desired by someone else and very little to do with their own real desires. 

I want to share with you the different goals I’ve had in my life regarding my body and how I would go about them differently today. Even as someone who accepts their body and finds great joy being in their body, I still like to have body goals what I hope is that you’ll pick up on the self honouring that’s driving them and the lack of body shame.

A few years ago, I had set a goal to be able to complete the ashtanga yoga primary series in 12 weeks. I thought it was such a good goal. In itself it could have been but when I dug in to really find why I had set that goal I realized I was driven by desires that were not my own.

Why did I want to be able to complete the primary series, because of all of the health benefits, yes but there was something else underneath it all. I’d finally be in shape, flexible and strong, so then I could be proud of my body, then I would be desirable. What does this really mean? It meant that I could finally have permission to be proud of my body, that that was conditional on have a certain shape, be flexible and strong. I was discounting that my body as it was had a shape, an amount of flexibility and strength that was already decent.

When I didn’t meet my first benchmark, I also realized how I hadn’t take my current body’s capabilities into account and had this fantasy of what my body could do if I just kept pushing it. Again, this could be a body resolution or goal that is aligned with your values but it really wasn’t for me. It was based on what I had internalized as being hot in the fitness world not on what was alive for me, within me. Oh and I did it all with this idea that I’d have reached my body goals through a healthier and more spiritually accepted path than the ones I had tried before.

I learned so many important lessons with this particular goal. I had not explored the internalized shame I had about my body before setting the goal and so it was always going to have this tinge of fixing something based on beauty and fitness  standards that were not necessarily my own. I had not checked it to see what my baseline was before setting the goal and so was starting from maybe not a dishonest place but certainly not a fully honouring and honest acceptance of what I could do with my body at the time. This may need a little more explanation. For instance, the yoga practice has headstands, I couldn’t get my legs over my head in the first variation where it was recommended to put elbows on the ground and form a triangle with the head as additional support and then move your way to a full headstand or was it a shoulder stand. Can I just add right here that even this idea of a first variation is not conducive to body acceptance, it implicitly says that it’s not good enough, just like full expression of the pose implies you’re not doing the full series unless you do it in full expression of each pose. Not true of all teachers, maybe not even true of the teachers I was learning from at the time but an interesting tidbit of you truly care about body acceptance. The other big lesson was that I got these little dopamine hits every time I planned because I believed it would make me better, more worthy somehow.

That’s why I’m sharing this with you now at a time when so many are creating new resolutions. Consider the full impact of this resolution before setting it and on the flip side if you don’t set any, would you decide to set one if it was more self guided?

Now when I set intentions for the year ahead, I do so from knowing myself first, having worked through the shame I had about my body and using my values as the springboard to envision what could be fun for me this time around.

In a more concrete way, I write out my values and check that they are mine and not someone else’s. Then I allow my imagination to come up with different ways I could live from that value. I pick an intention from this brainstorm and am willing to start testing and adjusting as I go.

This year, the value that comes up with my body is authentic expression. From my recent knee pain, I know there’s a restriction there and so I’m opting to find ways to be kind to my knees and help support it so that I may continue to move in the ways that my body desires and that make me happy. I allowed my imagination to come up with different ways I could do this and settled on focusing on mobility. In the past I would have probably tried to reinforce my knee with strength training but I sense I need more gentleness first so that’s what I’m going to experiment with. As we speak, I don’t have an exact goal with the mobility and I’m ok with that because it’s not about getting to something, it’s about creating more ease in movement. I know how to keep track of how my body feels and will use that as my gage for now. I’m likely to pivot some as my knee improves. 

I can sincerely say that I am honouring myself/values/desires, I am doing this for me out of respect for myself and I am setting myself up for success?

Accepting my body doesn’t mean I never have new goals for it, the goals are so much more aligned with my truest expression of my desires.

Goal setting, resolutions, all of it, can be a beautiful and enriching experience when done from self guidance. As a bonus, I’ll tell you that I like to set my goals from a place of deep presence and calm, usually after I’d done an embodiment practice or meditation. It goes hand in hand in a way, my experience has been that the more i am able to be present, the more i hear the messages from my body, the more i able to set value based intentions, the more I am able to accept myself and my body, the more I am able to be present.

That is my offering for you this week. Please share this episode with your friends who are setting goals right now as we move into the new year. Until next time. Love to each and everyone.